


Homeward

by Aithilin



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Childhood Trauma, Gen, Ravus Nox Fleuret Needs A Hug, Siblings, brief appearance of Lunafreya
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-15
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-12-16 20:37:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21042410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aithilin/pseuds/Aithilin
Summary: My piece for the Ravus Zine: Ravus should have known that once he left, he could never really return home as he was.





	Homeward

Ravus missed the flowering summer fruits of Tenebrae. He remembered the tall, ancient, arching branches just beyond his bedroom windows in his youth, when the sun filtered through the leaves to cast the bulbous shadows across his floors. He recalled the way the shadows danced in the breeze, so high above the rest of his kingdom— as if the Astrals themselves had placed the fruit within his lofty grasp as a blessing. As a sign of favour when he was young and still believed that his life, and the lives of his family, could be shaped by such nonsense. 

He remembered the charred remnants of the weaker trees crumbling beneath his fingers in the aftermath of the Imperial fire. And the streaks of grey ash left on his hands as he touched the resilient ancient limbs that had survived centuries of peace before. He recalled the sky clouded with ash and flames, and the blood of his mother coating his hands and clothes, ground in by his panic and pleading before he was marched to face his captors. The once chill and pristine air choking beneath the Niflheim heat and destruction. 

He remembered thinking that he would never see the spring blooms again as they took him away from his childhood home. 

The smoke barely settled before he and Lunafreya were given the mercy of accommodations in Gralea. The green lush of his childhood canopies traded for the barren cold of the Empire’s embrace; the wastes of the tundra and snowy mountains seeping into his bones just as much as the cold. The jagged, bare rocks of the icy training grounds scarring his hands and body just as much as the ice in the winds cut and scarred his face. 

But he knew he had been lucky. 

He had been blessed by the Astrals, after all. As his mother once said. He was the blood of the Oracle, and therefore gifted. And guided. And afforded the strength to endure the harsh Niflheim winters. 

Just as the great oaks of Tenebrae endured. 

He remembered the soft sniffles of his sister as they clung to each other on the train, side-by-side as he reassured her that she was safe. That they needed her. That they could never harm the future Oracle unless they wanted the whole of Eos clamouring for Imperial blood. It was always “They” and “Them” back then, as the greenery was left behind, and their uncertain future stretched out before them along the train tracks through the snow. As they huddled, arm-in-arm, across from faceless soldiers and the insincere smile of a foreign official. They had always had each other.

“But what about you?”

Ravus stepped through the rebuilt ruins of his childhood home with those words echoing around him.

What about him?

The sylleblossom fields had been reseeded in his absence. His mother’s gardens, now his sister’s, regrown and restored as best they could be without their mistress’ kind hands to draw the life from the soil. To see the first blooms stretch towards the sun in the open fields. The scarred halls smelled of the flowers now, the vivid blue of the Oracle’s omen spaced through the blanched wood halls in vases and cases, draped from pots hung with delicate ropes that could have been silk if he had thought to examine them. 

His steps echoed, and he remembered the rush of his sister’s smaller feet as she tore through the manor in their childhood. His own pace a hurried, youthful trot after her when they were young and free. Now a march of Imperial confidence echoed around him. 

The walls were wood; he had always remembered their feel and smell in the rain. Ancient wood, blanched in the sun over centuries and practically pulsing wit the magic of his lineage that he could feel but not wield. So sturdy that the manor could have been built of Lucian marble or Niflheim concrete; so pale now that they conjured images of frozen battlegrounds and training fields— of mountains caught in blinding blizzards, the harsh winter winds trying to beat the stone into submission. They echoed with the whites of Gralea and the sterile halls of places he was certain he was never meant to see when he was younger, when he was older, weeks ago before returning to his childhood home. They were scarred and scorched in places; he caught glimpses of the ashen grey cutting through the pristine royal white, half concealed by furniture and art and vases of blue flowers or green leaves. 

He was sixteen when he and Lunafreya were taken away from the ruins here. 

When her flowers burned as she was released by the traitorous Lucian King back into the arms of their shared enemies. 

He was eighteen when she was returned here without him. And he volunteered to the only option he saw that led to their safety. To their freedom from the roles they had been forced into by indelicate hands of murderers and so-called friends.

The Empire would never harm the Oracle. Lunafreya was indispensable to them. To Eos. 

(No matter how he recalled the fires and sword tearing through his mother before him, her courage to sacrifice herself a stark reminder of the Lucian cowardice that survived unscathed)

“But what about you?”

When he was young, Ravus expected a life of diplomacy. Of courtly smiles and military honours. He expected— as his mother always said— to be the First Son of the Oracle, to lead where he could. Where he was needed. To pave the way for Lunafreya’s more delicate steps. He had never expected to rule— the kingdom was not his, the flowers and crowns and adorations of the people were not his. He had understood his role, his responsibilities, his place in the wider world when he was young. 

Lunafreya would have her fields of endless flowers and the open skies above her. She would have the light of the Astrals before her and within her, to light her path wherever it took her. She would have the crowds of smiling faces and the adorations of the world at her feet. 

Ravus had expected to at least have the sturdy, ancient roots of Tenebrae at his. The open skies and the beloved gardens were for the Oracle; Ravus had only ever wanted those sturdy, ancient trees around him, the lace of the branches, and the canopy held aloft by the wide and dark limbs above him. The roots so deep they burrowed into the stone foundations of the plateaus where his ancestors claimed their home, the holy forests and mysterious canyons of the kingdom he would never rule as his sister would, but that he might lead. 

The ancient tree outside of his childhood bedroom had already flowered. 

There was no homecoming celebration for him. 

For the Oracle, there had been a parade and procession. Streamers draped from the gates and across the bridges that led to the manor. The music had filled the forest and was drowned out by the people of their kingdom jubilant in the return of their queen. 

Her road had been gilded by blossoms and ribbons and prayers.

There would be no celebration for a tool of the Empire in Tenebrae, and Ravus would have been disappointed if there was. The High Commander was not a position he beat and killed his way to— playing the Imperial games— out of a respect for the position. It was a position of necessity, and he had sacrificed his standing in his own kingdom, among his own people, to survive. 

He had shrugged off the snow and cold as he crossed the porous borders that had once stood as rigid as Lucian stone. He had let the Niflheim winds seep into his bones with their gripping chills and terrible, biting pains— a comfort now in the height of summer, as he had grown used to the barren colds. The lifeless wastes of the Niflheim tundra, and the jagged cuts of mountains like bones jutting through the lands as he crossed them. 

He had left blood on his road. But the trail had led him back home. 

He had stained the foreign snows with battle wounds on training grounds, and in skirmishes. He had left the blood of citizens and enemies alike— officers who dared to challenge him, rebels who dared to question the place he was cutting out for himself as he clawed his way from the fires that had burned away his childhood. He had left it all out there, on some Astral forsaken strip of snow and ice, in a smear of Imperial red. 

The bulbous shadows of once familiar fruits danced in the breeze against the pale walls and floor. Still too early in the season to pluck from the branches, the dark shadows moved in a welcoming pantomime across his floor. The waves of branches and blossoms and the early fruit a mimicry of the adulations he would never know again. The warm breeze and sunlight battering against the shields he had erected in the eight years he had been gone, he wondered briefly at the size of the rooms. They were smaller than he recalled— whatever belongings he once had little more than smoke and ash on the cold winter winds in the wake of the Lucian abandonment. The empty rooms still warmer than the spartan military bunks and sterile guest rooms of Gralea. He had not thought that he was so prone to nostalgia. 

“Ravus?”

He had spent eight years clawing his way through MTs, through the Imperial taunts and jeers and the snow. He had spent years spilling blood across the tundra training grounds, wrapping himself into the camouflage of Imperial sterile whites and ruthless reds. He had ground that blood into his skin to mask the blood he could never quite clean off when he was little more than a child.

He set the Tenebraean rapier aside as he turned with less than military precision for the first time since leaving the warm halls of his youth. He could feel the ice that had encased him soften in the light of Lunafreya’s smile. 

“Sister.”


End file.
